One of my favorite AI art pieces, "AI Grass" by Artonymousartifakt on SuperRare, February 2020. This is a pix2pix model that he trained on photographs of a single grass blade. I love the elemental poetics of this interaction with a natural form, a generated image that seeks to re-imagine the shape of earthly generation.
I heard about Artonymousartifakt from Pindar Van Arman, who described him as one of the only other people making art with AI when he first started out in the early 2000s. Artonymousartifakt was also one of the 167 people to mint on the SuperRare V1 contract (AI Grass is on V2). I just came across this thread by YeahYeah that details the history and meaning of this unique set of artists.
Artonymousartifakt continues to quietly create some of the most distinctive and poetic AI artworks in the space.
AI GRASS by ARTONYMOUSARTIFAKT
Updated
The Ethereum blockchain, introduced in 2015, revolutionized digital art by enabling asset tokenization. This allowed for unique 'ownership' of digital items, transforming easily copied artworks into scarce, provable assets. This development had a significant impact on AI-generated art, as it could now be uniquely owned and verified. In 2018, around 400 early AI artworks were minted and claimed on the blockchain, signaling the start of this now 'ownable' art form. By 2019, the number rose to just under 4000, showing increasing interest. Post-2020, the volume of minted AI artworks became so vast that it's impossible to accurately determine.
The mission of the 'UnderTheGAN' collection is to research, acquire, and present the earliest AI artworks in existence, whose authenticity and provenance are indisputable and verifiable due to their tokenized nature. This collection presents the works of a select group of pioneers who played a significant role in fueling the AI art revolution we are experiencing today. Jediwolf